The African Diaspora Policy Centre (ADPC) in partnership with Diaspora Development Education Migration (DIADEM) organized the first Knowledge Platform (KP) expert meeting in Dakar, Senegal on June 27-28, 2022. The KP was created to strengthen the interface between research, policy, and practice in the area of migration governance at continental, regional, national, and local levels. The KP specifically aims to narrate and amplify African perspectives on the ongoing migration and mobility political dialogues, both within and between Europe and Africa. To this end, the comparative advantage of the KP is that it operates as an agent and a mouthpiece for newly-formed African migration policy experts whose knowledge and expertise in the field are closely informed by an insider and first-hand observation on the ground.
The main purpose of the expert meeting was to provide a space for the expert members of the Knowledge Platform (KP) to have a face-to-face meeting which was delayed since 2020 due to the travel restrictions imposed by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic across the world. It was also a unique opportunity for the experts of the KP to convene, network, exchange knowledge and cross-fertilize ideas on the dynamics of migration governance from the context and perspectives within Africa. Moreover, the event was an occasion to raise the profile, voices and visibility of the African migration policy experts among migration policy and development community circles in Africa and Europe that participated in the meeting. Diverse United Nations institutions and development agencies such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Belgian Development Agency (Enabel) and Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) among others participated in the event. Furthermore, the expert meeting was organized to mobilise broader political support for the added value of the work of the KP in the efforts geared at strengthening the institutional capacity for migration governance in Africa. Finally, the event provided a forum for the expert members of the KP to deliberate and reflect on several urgent migration-related issues within the continent and beyond and identify emerging trends and explore key thematic policy areas that will form the core of the KP’s agenda and operational activities in the coming years. On this last point, the experts had extensively discussed the positioning of the KP in order to influence real policy changes within the development and migration community circles, better defining its operational strategic plans, widening the focus and scope of its activities and priority actions in the short and medium-term.
- This initiative is supported by Robert Bosch Stiftung
